 Good afternoon. Good afternoon. I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Wildein of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. And it's a really great pleasure for me to welcome all of you here today for a number of reasons. First of all, it is the first big event of the Ford School this year. It's also the first event that I had the opportunity to host as I am just taking over as a new dean for the Ford School. And so I'm really quite delighted that all of you have come to join us today on a very important day, I think, for the country and also more generally. And I'll talk a little bit about that briefly before I introduce our speaker. This is the fifth of our annual Joss Rosenfall Educational Fund lecture series. And let me just say a couple of words to you about the background for this lecture. There's more information about Josh and about his family and also about our speaker, who I'll introduce a little bit later, in the brochure that I hope all of you received when you came in. Josh Rosenfall was a graduate of the University of Michigan in 1979. He had a deep interest in public policy issues and international affairs more generally. He went on to get a master's degree in public policy from Princeton University and to have a career in international finance more generally. He was killed in the September 11th events, unfortunately, and this lecture series is to memorialize him in a variety of ways. In particular, what we seek to do is to have a forum that allows us to analyze and interpret the very many different policy issues that confront us in the aftermath of what happened on 9-11. And also to discuss and hopefully enable ourselves to perhaps reevaluate our views about those kinds of issues and to look for new policy approaches to deal with those ongoing challenges. Before I introduce the speaker today, I would like to say a few words about a really remarkable woman who was instrumental, in fact, the force behind this lecture series. And that's Josh's mother, Marilyn Rosenfall, who died just a month ago in August of this year. She had a long and very distinguished academic career. She was a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. She received a large number of awards. Her areas were health policy and medical sociology. And after her son was killed at the World Trade Center, she was really determined to try to understand what happened and why and how to think going forward. I'm not going to quote her extensively, but I do want to give you an excerpt from some of the words that she gave to the newspaper shortly after her son's death. She said, if you just hate them and don't try to understand, all you do is perpetuate that killing and the conflicts and the wars over and over again. And so it's really a matter of understanding to go forward. And those words really capture the spirit of what this lecture series is about. Thanks in large part to her efforts to establish the Rosenfall Fund. We've been able to bring a series of speakers to campus to talk about a range of these issues. As I've already said, I'm a newcomer here and I was not able to meet her firsthand. And I do want to express more generally the gratefulness that the Ford School community has to her efforts in that regard. I am pleased though to acknowledge and welcome several members of her family who are able to join us. And they are with us in the front of the stadium or the front of the auditorium this afternoon. In particular, some of his cousins, Sandra Serotti, Gary Serotti, and Richard Krieger. In the past years and in addition, his sister, Helen Rosenthal. In past years, Marilyn has joined us at this event and said a few words of introduction herself. Since she's unable to do that, Josh's sister has agreed to share some words with us. And I'd like to invite her, Helen Rosenthal, to come up and share some thoughts. So as Dean Collins mentioned, I'm speaking to you today representing my mother who died this summer, fortunately of natural causes. I want to thank Dean Collins and the Ford Graduate School for Public Policy for making this wonderful venue available for this series. And I would also like to thank my dear family, Gary and Sandra Serotti and Richard Krieger for coming today, for traveling so far. I'm blessed with a family that has been steadfast in its love and its support of me and our family. My mother started this lecture series in 2002 in honor of my brother, Josh Rosenthal, who was killed on September 11th, 2001, when he was working in his office on the 97th floor of the World Trade Center's South Tower. I heard from Josh's colleagues who made it out that he was meeting with clients in an inner office that morning and did not see the first plane hit the North Tower. They heard the noise and saw a red glow through the glass of their conference room. After Josh escorted his clients to the elevator where they escaped to safety, he went to his office, saw the carnage of the North Tower, and went to the stairwell. Josh and I both had apartments on Manhattan's Upper West Side. We were best friends and he came over to visit our apartment every Thursday to eat a family dinner and read stories to the kids and Sunday just to hang out. We often took our family vacations together. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, like most Americans, I watched the television in horror as the towers came down. As a New Yorker and a mother of school-age kids, I worried for my family. Although we tried to call Josh, it was in vain. My husband, who also worked on Wall Street, called to say that he watched the plane go into the South Tower and he was worried for Josh. Carmen walked the 80 blocks home and by early afternoon I went to pick up my kids from school. Buses and taxis were no longer running. We didn't own a car so I attached a buggy to the back of my bike and rode across the park and the east side to our daughter's school. I was in shock when I asked the school psychologist what to say to my kids about my missing brother, their uncle. She tried to reassure me. She said, tell them that we must hope for the best, but we fear the worst. I rode the bike home with my kids in the back. Oddly, for New York, there were no cars on the street. We rode right across the east and then west 83rd Street and every time we looked south down the very wide open avenues, all we saw was an amazing amount of smoke rising from downtown. Hundreds of people were walking north en masse with shocked looks on their faces. It is the only time I know of when we all share the same state of mind. It was an altered state. We searched each other's faces for meaning, but we could find none. Over the next few days and weeks, we acknowledged that our fears had come true. My mother established this lecture series to try to make sense of what was inherently a senseless act. Listed in your program are the bright and thoughtful people who have addressed this issue in previous years, and we are thrilled that Larry Cox, the Executive Director of Amnesty International, is speaking today. As a family member of someone who died on September 11th and looking at the political landscape today, September 11th, 2007, I do fear the worst, although I try to hope for the best. Thank you very much, Helen, for that very moving remembrance and putting in perspective that very important day that really is the backdrop for some of the issues that we would like to raise today. I now have the pleasure of introducing our speaker this afternoon. Again, there is additional information that is in the brochure that was handed out, but let me tell you that Larry Cox has served as the Executive Director for Amnesty International USA since January of 2006. Prior to joining Amnesty, he worked for over a decade as a Senior Program Officer for the Ford Foundation's Human Rights Unit, and there he focused on promotion of international justice and the advancement of domestic human rights issues. His career as a human rights advocate actually began more than 30 years ago at Amnesty International, and during his early years he was the Organization's First Communications Director. And as in a few moments you will hear, I'm sure you'll agree with me that his communication skills are a really paramount. He also served a number of other capacities, and his extensive resume includes involvements as an advocate for human rights throughout around the world. I won't list the large number of countries that he has been actively involved with, but they include China, India, Egypt, Nigeria, Guatemala, Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Brazil, and I could go on at length. Larry holds a BA in history from Mount Union College. He's currently pursuing a Master's Degree in Religion and Human Rights at Union Theological Seminary. I hope you'll agree that the myriad issues that Larry is going to raise and discuss with us today about human rights in the post-911 world are really of critical importance, and it's with great pleasure on behalf of the Ford School that I invite Larry Cox to the podium. Thank you very much. It's a great honor and a humbling experience to be here, and I also want to thank Helen for her very moving remarks. I was also in New York City on September 11, 2001, and your remarks reminded me again of the horror of that moment when all of us were touched in ways that we can never truly forget, and some of us, of course, were touched very deeply and very painfully, but I thank you for making us, giving us such a vivid recollection of what happened on that day. I want to talk today not only about what 9-11 did to us, but about what we have in the year since begun to do to 9-11. It's a heavy responsibility to give a talk on that subject on this day, a day that truly changed our country. As is true for so many other experiences where human beings and their rights have been horrifically violated, there really are no words, and certainly there are no words of mine that can adequately describe the horror of the attacks six years ago. And I cannot fully imagine, let alone put into words, the pain felt by those whose loved ones, like Josh Rosenthal, were killed on that day. I can only express and I want to express my deep admiration indeed my awe for those like Professor Rosenthal who responded to such an immeasurable loss, not with calls for revenge, but a quest for the understanding that alone offers us the hope of a different and a better world. In that world, in the world that we aspire to, this day will be marked exclusively by remembering and honoring each person who died, by celebrating the heroism of those who risked and in many cases gave their lives to save others, and especially by renewing our commitment to the rights that were so grievously violated and whose protection provided the basis for genuine security. But sadly, in the world in which we do live, this day, this anniversary almost immediately also became something else. It became 9-11 the political tool, the ideological weapon. It became, to paraphrase the eloquent words of Marilyn Rosenthal, the rallying cry in a war for which none of us volunteered and for a cause that has still not been convincingly articulated. Those who continue to work around the world to inflict death and terror on civilian men, women and children for political and even God help us for religious reasons, those people see the destruction of the World Trade Center and so many lives as a glorious work of propaganda, proving that even the most powerful nation on earth can successfully be severely hurt and damaged. And for many, including those who have the prime responsibility to prevent such hurt, the pain of that day has become a rationale for a dramatic expansion of executive power and a justification for policies and practices that can never be justified, not by international or constitutional law and not by standards of common human decency. The reason it is necessary, so necessary to talk about this even on a day such as this, is that in doing it, those advancing this use of 9-11 have so successfully transformed the actual massive attack on human rights into a powerful ideological attack on the very idea of human rights. An idea, an attack on the core idea of human rights. The idea that all people, without exception, no matter who they are, what they believe or even what they have done, have certain rights rooted in the inherent dignity of human beings that can never be violated for any reason by any power. This is the idea, the product of a long historical struggle for which many have fought and died that has become one of the most powerful elements of all efforts to reduce human suffering, advance human dignity and freedom, and transform our world for the better. And what makes this attack on this idea of human rights so serious is precisely that it is coming not just from regimes that have always demonstrated their contempt for human rights and it's coming not just from those armed groups whose unrestrained use of terror confirms that they have not accepted even the concept of human rights. What makes the current attack on the idea of human rights so dangerous, so urgently in need of discussion is that it is coming from the most unexpected of places, from a nation that has long seen itself and has been seen by so many around the world as the champion of human rights, as a fighter for human rights. It is coming from the place in which we have special ties and for which we have a special responsibility. The most serious of attacks on the idea of human rights is also coming from the United States of America. Now, I don't say these words lightly or easily. I have the privilege of being the executive director of Amnesty International USA, a global organization that for 45 years has documented and mobilized public pressure around the world against some of the cruelest abuses that human beings can inflict on other human beings. These include holding people behind bars indefinitely without charges or trial, sentencing people to long terms of imprisonment or even to death after trials which fall far short of any system of real justice, disappearing people, that is kidnapping them and then sending them to secret detention sites so that even their families or the Red Cross have no idea where they are or whether they are alive or dead and using torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment practices that can destroy the spirit of those who suffer of them and always destroy the humanity of those who inflict them. Amnesty International and this global work over the years has always had concerns about serious human rights violations carried out in and by the United States, including cases of unfair trials, racial discrimination and the widespread use of the death penalty. We've also always documented and fought against the U.S. role in condoning or even encouraging torture or other serious violations by supposed allies. But if I'm honest, even in my most pessimistic and discouraged moments, I never expected to live to see precisely the types of gross violations of human rights associated with dictatorships not just carried out but openly and publicly defended by the highest elected officials in the land, including the President and the Vice President and then ratified by the United States Congress. And yet we all know the entire world knows that this is what is now happening, has been happening for many years. We cannot claim ignorance. It's not a secret. It has been widely exposed and documented in numerous books and articles. It cannot be denied. And indeed what is so disturbing, what makes these abuses different from many of those in our past, is that they are not denied, but rather they are openly defended. We have not hidden that we have locked up hundreds of individuals, not for days or months, but for years, more than four or five years in places like Guantanamo Bay and Cuba, without charging, let alone trying them for any crime. With total disregard for the presumption of innocence, we are told that this is okay because these are the worst and most dangerous people on the earth. Some of them may well be, but we know that many are not, among other reasons because the U.S. authorities have themselves let hundreds of them go free, after after holding them for years without ever having linked them to terror or charged them with a crime. People like Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish national who was arrested in Afghanistan in November 2001. It was only in January 2002 that his family learned where he was, that he was being held in Guantanamo. His mother, as mothers do, began to campaign for his release, but it was only in August 2006, four years and eight months later, that he was reunited with his family, never having been charged with a crime, never tried for a crime, and receiving no compensation for what was done to him. Because there are no trials, because those being held have no access to a court. We cannot know for sure how many still being held are as innocent as Murat Kurnaz, but we do know the way that many have been treated. I ask you sadly to listen to this description of what was observed at Guantanamo. On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more. On one occasion the air condition had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. On another occasion, the air conditioning had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night. Now I share this testimony not because it is the worst testimony that we have. There are cases in places like Iraq and Afghanistan where prisoners held by the United States have died as a result of their abuse. I share this testimony because it comes not from another detainee, not from a bleeding heart human rights advocate like me, but it comes from an agent of the FBI. And what he is reporting are techniques that when they are used by other countries, the U.S. State Department properly calls torture. This is also what the International Committee of the Red Cross calls it. Looking at the pattern of abuse in Guantanamo, the Red Cross in 2004 said in unusually blunt language, the construction of such a system whose stated purpose is production of intelligence cannot be considered other than the intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture. We also know that in our name, our government also outsources torture using what is called extraordinary rendition. Now what this antiseptic term means is seizing individuals and sending them to countries where it is highly likely indeed it is virtually certain that they will be tortured. Marrera Rahr, a Canadian citizen, was changing planes at JFK Airport in New York when he was taken into custody by the FBI and other officials. He was denied a lawyer and after a week in detention he was taken in the middle of the night to New Jersey. He was put on a plane that took him to Jordan where he was chained and then eventually driven across the border to Syria where he was placed in a filthy underground cell about the size of a grave where he was beaten with cables until he falsely told them that he had been in Afghanistan. He was held in those conditions for more than 10 months until the Syrians, the Syrians let him go with an acknowledgement that they could find no evidence that he was ever involved in terrorism. There has never been any evidence shown that he was involved in terrorism. Others have been kidnapped and sent to U.S. secret prisons somewhere in Europe or Asia where they have been subjected also to torture including regular beatings. Khaled El-Masri, a German national, he was on vacation in Macedonia when he was abducted, hooded and sent to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan where for months he says he was shackled, beaten and injected with drugs. He was released after five months of this treatment allegedly by a direct order by Condoleezza Rice when she was told that a mistake had been made and he had been confused with someone who had a similar name. A German court has issued an arrest warrant for 13 CIA agents who were part of his disappearance team. The Italian courts have charged another 25 CIA operatives with the kidnapping of Abu Omar who was sent to Egypt where he says he was tortured. Now we know we have more testimonies that there are others who have been disappeared in this way but how many as well as the size, the location and exactly what happens in these secret prisons that's information that is withheld from all of us. But the president last September did announce to the world not only that such secret prisons which are universally regarded as a severe violation of international law not only that they exist where what he called alternative techniques are used but he said that he would fight harder than he's fought on almost any other issue to keep those secret prisons working. So far his biggest obstacle has been the courts. In June 2006 the Supreme Court ruled that the so-called military commissions that were set up to eventually try some of the prisoners in Guantanamo were unconstitutional. Had not been authorized by Congress, violated international law and the court added that the Geneva Conventions which among other things prohibit torture or humiliating or degrading treatment apply to all detainees held by the United States. This ruling gave the U.S. Congress the opportunity to put the United States back on the road to respecting and protecting human rights. Instead our Congress took bad policy and turned it into even worse law. That's the Military Commissions Act of 2006 which states that the president has the power to designate almost any non-citizen captured as an illegal enemy combatant which allows them to be held indefinitely without charges or trial to be tried if they are at all not by a court but by a military commission which will allow evidence to be heard that a real court would never accept. The act strips those being held of habeas corpus the longest standing form of protection against abuse one which goes back 800 years to the Magna Carta and enables a prisoner to get access to a real court to determine if there are grounds for that prisoner being held. The act did nothing to challenge the idea of secret prisons which the U.N. Committee on Torture has ruled is itself a form of torture. The act did in the end uphold the Geneva Conventions but it gave to the president the authority to decide what exactly constitutes humiliating and degrading treatment and instead of legislating steps that would demonstrate that the U.S. is serious about preventing torture it made it more difficult to hold anyone accountable for such acts. The administration proudly stated that the Military Commissions Act allows the CIA to continue to use the alternative techniques which so far it has refused to describe. With this act the U.S. Congress officially in the name of all of us carried out an assault on the idea of human rights the idea that there are certain rights that belong to all human beings even those that we have labeled enemy combatants. Now why does this matter so much? Why is it so important to talk about this even on a day like today? Well clearly of course it matters to those individuals who have suffered directly and immensely and who continue to do so from these acts. But there are after all many countries not to mention private actors like Al Qaeda whose abuse of human rights is far more massive and more egregious than that of the United States. The problem is there is no country whose example is more powerful than that of the United States. What makes the U.S. attack on the idea of human rights so serious is not that we are worse than other countries but that we have always aspired to be so much better that we have proclaimed to the world that we are better when that country when the world's superpower and its greatest democracy openly defends its own violation of human rights it sends a powerful message to dictators and killers around the world helping them justify what is unjustifiable. It encourages repressive policies by our more democratic allies and even more seriously it undermines it attacks the difficult and dangerous efforts of brave men and women who are fighting around the world on the front lines against tyranny and acts of cruelty. We see this in our work almost every single day. In places like Egypt, Zimbabwe, China and Russia and Pakistan among others U.S. acts are being used to justify the unjustifiable. Just last week Iran which has been under severe and justifiable criticism for its arrest of an American scholar as well as others responded to the criticism by pointing to violations committed by the United States said the president of Iran they have established secret prisons and are kidnapping anyone they want at airports without any legal jurisdiction. Now pointing to others to defend your own human rights violations is an old game but what makes the game work is when the charge is absolutely correct and in this case sadly it is. Those who know the harm being done to the idea of human rights by U.S. actions are precisely those who have suffered the most because of it. Not too long ago I spoke with a man a remarkable man named Hassan Biliti he's a courageous journalist who was arrested on seven separate occasions and each time severely tortured in Liberia by the notorious gangster president Charles Taylor. Hassan told me that the last time he was arrested Taylor informed him you know you have no rights because you are an enemy combatant. And when Hassan said he'd never heard the expression enemy combatant it was explained to him that Liberia had learned this phrase from the United States. As the esteemed leader in the fight for human rights in South Africa Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said I never imagined that I would live to see the day when the United States and its allies would use precisely the same arguments that the apartheid governments used to justify detention without trial. Now the point here is not that repressive governments and terror groups would stop committing their horrible acts if not for the example of the United States. These groups do not need our help in violating human rights. The point is that the United States can hardly play a leading role in working against these acts when we have by our deeds and words provided the rationale for them. How can we criticize Syria or Egypt for torture when we send people there for interrogation knowing that they will be tortured? How can we criticize indefinite detention without trial a denial of access to a court when we have legislated precisely such practices? And where will we now find the moral authority to lead the world to stop massive atrocities as are happening in Darfur? And how can we help human rights defenders around the world when we have directly weakened the only source of power they have? The power that comes from the idea of human rights. This idea that says there are no exceptions that everyone has rights that cannot be violated. The attack on the core idea of human rights is a direct attack on the power of the global movement for human rights. Now we all know the limits of that power. In my job we experience the limits of that power every day. But we also know what this idea can achieve. Human rights are not a magic solution. The struggle for their advancement is not like ordering a military invasion. It's a long and hard struggle. But we have seen, the whole world has seen, that over time this idea and those who fight for it have the power to literally open prison doors. Have the power to transform entire societies. But this power of human rights is directly related to the world's commitment to human rights. And when that commitment is weakened, as it has been by U.S. words and deeds, we see a world in which abuses are the most massive kind flourish without effective challenge. The world desperately needs U.S. leadership, especially now in advancing the idea and the practice of human rights. And this is why, no matter what people we seek to defend around the world, no matter what human rights issue we care about, our first priority, our urgent priority, has to be to turn this country around on human rights. And the first step is to understand how we got here. How did we reach the point where our country is openly defying international human rights law? And here it's important to pause and emphasize that our current human rights crisis is not simply the result of one president or one political party. Many of the practices that I've just described were carried out with the support or acquiescence of people on both sides of the aisle. And in advancing the idea that human rights standards are not applied to the United States as they do to other countries, it has been possible to draw on a long and ugly national tradition, one that goes back to the early days of U.S. leadership in creating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The year was 1948, and the U.S. faced a major dilemma. And where it was, it was developing standards of human rights that forbid any form of discrimination, and it was doing this at a time when it was allowing a system of racial apartheid to operate inside the United States, a system that resulted in massive violations of human rights, inferior education and health care, denial of the right to vote, and open lynchings and extradition killings that affected millions of its citizens. That history is a long and complex one that I don't have time to discuss in detail, but basically the solution, the dilemma of this contradiction was not to do away with racial apartheid as quickly as possible, but to develop a policy and a practice of aggressively promoting human rights abroad while ensuring that those same standards would not be applied or enforced at home. This harmful tradition of what is called, usually, U.S. exceptionalism has been extremely useful in defending the current practices, but it does not explain them. And they also, and it's important to emphasize this again on this day especially, they cannot be explained as the inevitable result of what happened six years ago. There is no doubt that the attacks on New York and Washington that killed 3,000 people and made it so painfully clear that the United States would not be immune from the terror that so many around the world live with. There's no doubt that it produced a national trauma that is still with us. No one should downplay the extremely serious threat that these attacks represent, a threat that will continue for many years to come. The attacks on 9-11 were massive crimes against humanity. They were carried out by people who believe they have the right to kill whoever they choose and who have continued to celebrate such killings in Bali, Madrid, Mumbai, London, and in Israel and Iraq, among other countries. We don't need video messages from Osama bin Laden to know that such attacks could come again. No one, certainly no one who cares about human rights, should fail to take with utmost seriousness the need defined in an effective way to combat what is really an ideology of death or should question that we needed to mount a strong response to the attacks that were made upon us and have been made sense upon others. But what is very much in question is the way we respond. The way our understandable anger and fear on that day were used because it was not the inevitable or the only possible response. For this country has another tradition from which it's possible to draw hope instead of fear. This is, after all, not the first time in our history that we have been attacked, including on our own soil, by people determined to destroy us in the name of a superior ideology. You know, the President and others have often given to Osama bin Laden and his allies a status that I'm sure once upon a time they only dreamed of, comparing the fight against them to the war against fascism and saying that we are now once again engaged in that kind of battle for civilization. Many have questioned whether given the carelessness and inadequacy of how the country has been mobilized, whether the administration itself really believes that we are engaged in a fight on this scale. But there was a time when no one could question that we were engaged in a true battle for civilization, a time when our foes were not hiding in caves, but had seats in the capitals of some of the world's most powerful military states. Foes, whose ideology of racial superiority led to the death not just of thousands, but the systematic extermination of millions and the brutal conquest of nation after nation. And in the face of that threat to our very existence, the United States did of course respond militarily, putting together a genuine and powerful global alliance. No one then had to debate whether we had committed enough troops. But what truly changed, not just our history, but the history of the human race, was that U.S. leaders understood. They understood that while military force was absolutely necessary, it was in no way sufficient to ensure a lasting victory. They understood that we needed a larger vision, an idea around which the broadest and strongest international alliance could be built and sustained. And it was our president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in a remarkable speech on January 6, 1941 gave words to that idea, saying that we were fighting for four fundamental freedoms and defining freedom as, quote, the supremacy of human rights everywhere. That's the idea that seven years later would be embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And that document was a revolutionary step forward, because for the first time in history, governments proclaimed that there are absolute limits to what they can do to those they rule, and that any violation of those limits is a matter of international concern. Now, this extraordinary development was made possible only by the vivid memory of the indescribable horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. And there's no doubt that governments did not fully understand what they had done. And there's also no doubt they've been trying to find ways around their own commitment ever since. But nonetheless, that declaration put in motion forces that have led to some of humanity's greatest victories. And after that day six years ago, when the whole world, almost the whole world, was united in common outrage, we did not respond to the new threat we face by embracing this powerful idea of human rights. We did not strengthen the mechanisms that have been created to advance that idea. The U.S. did not affirm human rights by seriously seeking to bring to justice in a visibly fair way those who were responsible for crimes against humanity. We did not use human rights to isolate those who celebrate death and to win over others to life by advancing economic and social rights around the world. Instead, our government responded not by fighting fear, but by giving into it. Indeed, I would say, by exploiting it. You remember, declared that we were in a new kind of war, and that new war required a new way of fighting. Yet the new way of fighting turned out to be a very old one, one which rolled back the lessons of World War II, declared that the Geneva Conventions were quaint and obsolete, and began, as we have seen, to turn the war on terror into a war on the core idea of human rights. The attacks on September 11, 2001 presented a new administration, already eager to increase executive power with a perfect opportunity to escape the irritating restraints imposed by international law. This is not unprecedented, it's not unusual. Governments almost always violate human rights in the name of increasing security, but almost always it is also about increasing power. And what has been the result? The creation of secret prisons, the abandonment of habeas corpus, the use of indefinite imprisonment, special military tribunals, torture and cruel inhuman integrating treatment, has hardly made us safer, and it has certainly not helped to bring to justice those who have committed acts of terror. Instead, those acts have put our very, our own system of justice on trial. You know, the first of these extremely dangerous killers in Guantanamo to go before a military commission, the first and only one, David Hicks, received a sentence of nine months, and one of the conditions of the deal is that he promised to drop any claim that he had been mistreated. Others may be harder, however, to silence. Abed al-Rahim al-Nashri, who's been held without charges for four years, claims that he confessed to crimes only so that he could stop being tortured. And as Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post points out, here is what the Bush administration has done to the values, traditions, and honor of the United States of America. No one is shocked or even surprised. There is reason to believe, in fact, that what the suspect says about torture is probably true. Nor have these violations of human rights reduced the numbers of those seeking to carry out new acts of terror. Our numerous intelligence agencies agree, almost unanimously, that there are now more people using terror and more acts of terror than ever before. Al-Qaeda is reported to be stronger than ever. Osama remains free and vocal. And then there is, of course, Iraq. Now, Amnesty International is not an anti-war organization. But in terms of human rights, whatever our intentions, we have produced in Iraq what can only be called a human rights disaster, with millions fleeing the country and killings every day of civilians as well as, of course, of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers. Instead of presenting to potential sympathizers of terror an alternative, a better way to obtain justice in a different life, we have seen Guantanamo and the terrible acts committed at places like Abu Ghraib become the very face of America and a gift to those seeking new recruits to terror and to weaken and attack the very idea of democracy. We may be in a global battle for civilization, as the President says, but to fight it, we first have to resolve the battle for civilization that's being fought right now within the United States. A battle for our security and our future. And I would say a battle for nothing less than our soul as a nation. That's what's at stake. And that brings us to the critical moment for human rights in a post-911 world. For there are signs that the use of our fear to bludgeon us into accepting the loss of our values no longer works as well as it once did. We are beginning to see allies, like Italy and Germany and Canada and now even the UK begin to openly challenge U.S. policies. And in the new Congress there are some, albeit very fragile, stirrings of hope. Legislation has already been or will be introduced to restore habeas corpus, to stop the kidnapping and sending the people to places of torture, to stop secret detention sites, and to stop the torture that we know goes on in them. Of course it will take more than legislation to restore U.S. leadership in the fight for human rights, but such acts would be a major step forward. And that step, that step depends on all of us. Amnesty International, for its part, is seeking to mobilize people as never before to win this fight. We believe that we must win it and we believe that we will win it. Not because of the America we live in today, but because of the America we believe in. America we have always believed in and that so many have died fighting for. The America that all of us, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, young or old, rich or poor, were taught to believe in. The America that in school we all took a pledge to. A pledge to liberty and justice for all. This is the America that, as Jimmy Carter put it, did not invent human rights. This is the America that was invented by human rights. The America that began with a declaration that said all people are created equal with certain inalienable rights, inalienable rights. The America that millions of people around the world have looked to for help and hope because it was an America that aspired, however short it fell, to be a leader for and not a violator of human rights. That is the America that was attacked on this day six years ago. And that is the America that keeps on being attacked every time we wrongly commit violations of human rights in the name of that day. The America we believe in is the America we're fighting for. And I ask you to join in that fight because this America needs every one of us. There have been moments in the last years, maybe for you as well as for me, when it's been difficult to believe in that America. But as I travel around the country speaking to audiences like this one, meeting students like those I met today, meeting members of the Rosenthal family, I find that my faith grows stronger and stronger. And God knows we need faith. As one of the greatest human rights leaders in our history, Martin Luther King Jr. once said, we're gonna need a faith strong enough to hew from a mountain of despair a stone of hope. Six years ago, we were given one of the greatest mountains of despair we have ever experienced. I hope you will join today, especially on this day, in a commitment to create more stones of hope. Stones that we can use to build a new foundation for the struggle to realize for all people the promise of justice and the promise of human rights. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Larry, for your incredibly stimulating remarks. Thank you also for agreeing to take some questions and answers. Let me let you moderate that if you don't mind. I'm especially interested in taking answers. If you have any, please offer them. Yeah, sure. One of the issues that keeps confusing me, and I wonder if it confuses all of us, is our initial reaction of viewing the terrorist acts as something to go to war against, rather than treating as a criminal act. And I wonder, from your perspective, to what extent that decision or reaction has contributed to our violation of human rights. Yeah, that's a very good point. And it is my view and the view of amnesty, in fact, that this was a fatal shift, an extremely dangerous shift, to view this as acts of war, rather than as extremely criminal acts. And in a number of ways, that first of all, as I mentioned, it elevated the people who had committed those acts into almost as if they were nation states, which, of course, is what they aspired to. That was one of their goals. And so I think they were gratified to be suddenly treated as if they were not a band of criminals, but a nation state committing an act of war. But second of all, there's no doubt in my mind that the reason the shift was made was not simply rhetorical, not simply wanting to emphasize, which is understandable, but serious about doing everything in our power to bring those people to justice. But it was done because under war, it's much easier to justify the kinds of violations that then took place. You know, criminal law and criminal acts, you know, you have limits on what you can do. The argument that's been made consistently by the administration has been that under war, the President has constitutional powers basically to do whatever he wants to do. And as I said, there's evidence that this was a goal long before the events of September 11th, and then September 11th happened, and this became an opportunity to push even harder. I'm not trying to say that there wasn't genuine horror and outrage on the part of the administration, but it was also seen as an opportunity to use the war metaphor to enable it to do things like hold people indefinitely, set up secret prisons, do away with habeas corpus, do a number of things that were, in their view, only possible if you declared a state of war. And it has created a mentality like many wars that we have declared. You know, we have also declared a war on drugs and a war on, you know, we declare wars all over the place, and the one thing that those wars have in common is that we almost never win those wars. And in fact, they're not really set up to be one. They're set up to create this kind of rhetorical framework that can then be used. So I think it was extremely serious and damaging, and I think the world would have united behind an effort, and there would have been ways to express it that expressed the outrage that we all felt to see it as crimes against humanity and to concentrate on bringing to justice the people that committed those crimes against humanity instead of using it as a way to launch really an unlimited expansion of executive power that has brought us, in my view, to the human rights crisis we're in today. So I think it was a very serious turning point and a negative one. Yes? Speaking out, what's going on? Well, yeah, it was amazing to me as well. I was working at the time at the Ford Foundation and I hadn't intended to come back to the life which is, frankly, a harder life than working at the Ford Foundation of being an activist on the front lines. But I could not stand to see this country rolling back standards that I thought were firmly established. And I really genuinely never thought I would see the United States openly violate in the way that it did. But on the other hand, if I looked around the world through the eyes of Amnesty's work around the world, I should have realized that there are many other countries where such acts have been carried out and where we always said, how is it possible? How can people in Chile, how can people in other countries allow those acts to take place? And now we have the answer. It's because people, when they're afraid, are willing to tolerate things that they would not normally tolerate, especially if it's told them that these acts are the only way that you can get protection. These acts are the only way that you can get the justice that you deserve. And I think we in the human rights movement underestimated, and this is a self-criticism, underestimated did not take seriously enough the fear that people felt as a result of those events in New York and in Washington. And for too long we issued reports and so on saying these are violations of international law, but we didn't address the fact that people wanted some way to express their outrage and some way to feel protected. I think we've learned, and we are now talking in terms of, as I tried to do a little bit here, have these acts, do violations of human rights really offer people protection? Do they really make you feel safer? To know that the entire world now has one of the lowest opinions of the United States of America that has ever been held since we began polling such attitudes. Does it really help you to know that our actions are being used by Al Qaeda and by numerous other groups as recruitment propaganda to get more and more people to engage in terror? Does it really help to know that we have lost our moral authority to speak out on other issues or to be taken seriously? Does that really make us safer? And I think that people now are beginning to see that it doesn't. And it's not a question of whether you're a fan of the Bush administration or whether you're a fan of the Democrats. It's really, and that's why I tried to frame it like this, it's a question of what kind of America do you want to live in? What kind of America do you believe in? And I think slowly, although I am terrified to be honest, that if there's another attack tomorrow, which there could be, that we might once again be back in the fear paradigm that will produce this. But I'm hopeful. And the last part of your question is that, no, enough people have not expressed their outrage. And that's exactly what we're about. And when I say we need everybody, it's really not a kind of bit of typical LAMASI international rhetoric. I know that we need more people to speak out. We fought very hard against the Military Commissions Act in 2006. We mobilized people. That's what we do. We mobilize people to make phone calls, to write their legislators to say, you know, we don't want to go down this road. We don't think this road makes us safer. We think it hurts us as a country. And frankly, we didn't mobilize enough people. People were afraid. Even the people who voted against the Military Commissions Act did so more or less quietly because they did not want to be branded as being soft on terror. And I think the only way we're going to change the situation, whatever happens in the elections, whatever already happened and whatever happens in the next elections, it will take everybody mobilizing, letting their representatives know that they will not be regarded as weak because they stand up for the Constitution and they stand up for basic human rights. And that takes mobilization, and we haven't done it enough. And, you know, I come here today and I go around the country trying to urge people to do what they can to make their voices heard because I think that's the only hope to turn this around. And believe me, it's desperately important for the whole world that we turn it around. And the world will be happy to give us the credit when we do. In the 1950s, the United States spent billions of dollars researching the methods that became today's torture. Yes, that's right. The School of the Americas has been operating since 1947, teaching torture. So there's a whole history here that says that torture is not new. Violations of the core of human rights is not new in this country. There was plausible benign ability before. So what we've got now is a official policy and a defense of it rather than a denial of it. But I think if you include that, I think you could do a better job than I could. But then this whole thing looks like all the other words. No, that's true. And it's part of the ambiguity or the difficulty of trying to capture the fact that I love my country and I'm proud of my country, but not to whitewash the fact that on human rights, the country has a record of violating human rights. And you're quite right. There's several remarkable books that describe the history that you just outlined very quickly of U.S. involvement in developing, learning from and developing, especially forms of torture that don't involve physical abuse, so-called mental or psychological forms of torture that we have experimented with and developed and are now using. A lot of what is being talked about and debated and people get confused about this because they think it's not torture if you're not putting electrical wires on somebody, if you're not breaking bones. The stress positions, making people stand in uncomfortable positions for long hours. The use of phobias, the lack of sleep, the disorientation, all of that are classic torture techniques that have been in which the U.S. has learned through some of these studies. But the difference is that that was done more or less secretly and when it was used and when there were violations, as there were in Vietnam, for example, and it was exposed, you didn't get people arguing that it was okay, that it was defensible. And that's a huge shift and a very dangerous shift. So I agree with you, and I don't want to whitewash the U.S. track record, but as long as the U.S. is being hypocritical, there's hope. It's when there's no longer any hypocrisy. They're saying, yes, we are doing these things and we think it's all right to do these things and they're saying to the whole world, yeah, it's all right. And believe me, governments, like the Egyptian government, came back and said we're so glad that you finally agree with us, because you were criticizing us for locking people up indefinitely without trial, but now we see that you learn from us and they're very happy and that's why it's so dangerous, this shift. Okay, now we're... Yeah, there's a mic back there, so you have to want to ask a question enough to get up and move. So do you want to do that? Yes, you do. May I ask a question first? Yeah. Oh, I thought you were just handling the microphone. I didn't know you. I agree with everything that you've said this afternoon and you've said it eloquently, I might add. I just wonder, first of all, do you believe that there is a threat out there, a Muslim extremist threat? And if so, how can we combat it without suspending human rights? Ah, yeah. Well, the first answer is yes, I do believe. I would be amazed that anybody could not believe, because there's evidence of it all the time. There is a threat. I think it's dangerous to see the threat strictly as an alarmist or a Muslim extremist threat. I think the threat comes from many different forms, but there's no doubt that that's a large element of it. And the question is, how do you combat it? That's precisely the question. Is the best way to combat it to confirm the propaganda that those groups are using to recruit people into that way of life, which is that the United States doesn't really believe in democracy, it doesn't really believe in justice, it doesn't really believe in human rights, it just believes in power. It's using that power against us and so on and so forth. Or do you really begin to try to I'm not talking about winning over the hard core people who have that ideology. I wouldn't know how to do that. But what all small groups of whether you call them guerrillas or whether you call them terrorists need is a much wider body of sympathy, a much wider body of people who aren't actively committing those acts, but who support it, who give them support, who give them a sense of legitimacy. And those people I think could be won over by an attempt to address what are their real issues of their real grievances. Instead the United States has reaffirmed or reconfirmed their their worst nightmares instead of helping them see that human rights is something real that will help them that they should adhere to and there's no quick answer to this. I mean that's the other thing that was so appealing about right after 9-11 was that the people who advocated this kind of hard line, lock them up throw away the key, do whatever you have to do I think it was Dick Cheney who said take off the gloves, you know go move over to the dark side. All of that language evokes a kind of quick solution. We're going to wipe these people out we now know six years later that that didn't happen and what I'm talking about also will not happen. We're going to be living with the threat of people committing terrible acts of terror for various reasons certainly all of my lifetime and probably my son's lifetime but we can weaken it we can take steps that will reduce the ability of those groups that can isolate those groups rather than pushing those groups pushing them into the arms of people who would not have had sympathy for them but when they look at U.S. action say maybe they're right maybe this is something that the only way to stop the United States is to engage in these kinds of acts so there's no quick answer but there is a different approach that we need to do yeah okay you got to move quickly to get to a mic maybe you can get it you and then you well I have been concerned for quite some time of what it would take for the American populace to see that it was in their best interest to become more concerned about the human rights related to this war on terrorism but not only that but it also used to ratify other human rights treaties as well both Democrats and Republicans and in fear I imagine of making some case law that would allow American citizens to further certain agendas domestically but in thinking of what might have interfered with that our best interest is in general a rather negative attitude toward the UN for number one and now that I think that America is awakening to the fact that they have voted in an administration that did not have the best interest of the country in hindsight and so one piece of it seems to be related to the UN and then the other thing I remember myself very vividly after September 11th 2001 is how many of our leaders not just our president but congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle and offering prayers how many times they invoked God and God being on our side and I remember a phrase from the 60s right as might you know the whole point of it is that if we put many of our leaders words into Arabic it might have sounded a little bit like some Muslim Hussein or Osama bin Laden and I my impression is that Americans when they felt you know somewhat collectively regardless of their religion that God was on our side and when our leaders were telling us God was on our side we failed to see that our interest was something else you know it's like when we feel that and when we're being told all the time and when we're dealing with our pain and suffering by invoking God and how many times we invoke God in these kind of conversations you know I'm just wondering if that is interfering as well of seeing what our best interest is yeah I agree with I think your two points which is one that we have not been served well by the actually largely bipartisan bashing of the United Nations rather than a strengthening of believe me the United Nations needs to be strengthened and there are lots of problems with it but unilateralism really will not work as we've seen and so I agree with you on that on the God issue it's a long discussion but I would just refer people to Abraham Lincoln who had to deal with this notion that God was you know on one side or another in the Civil War and wrote some very profound language about the dangers of ever assuming that you know that God is on our side rather than other people's side and I just will leave it to people to dig out the writings of one of our greatest presidents on the danger of invoking God and the sight of a conflict. You've never got a chance right? If people could be very good just run up and be ah thank you very kind you've talked about the administration abandoning human rights in a sort of historical way and sort of invoking this very clinical language that goes away from human rights but what about with the war in Iraq this idea of liberating Iraq and actually co-opting the language of human rights to defend that's a very good point thank you actually it's very interesting the language that the administration usually uses is not human rights but democracy and that's not a coincidence because democracy is something that I mean involves having elections that's what they usually mean by democracy that we're having elections when you talk about human rights you're talking about international law that forbids you to do certain things as a government as a way to get to democracy and of course without human rights I don't think you can have a genuine democracy but but it's not an accident that the language which is used most often is not about human rights which would have called into question some of the things we were doing but it's more about about advancing democracy and the question is whether you can really advance democracy anywhere in the world if you're not also trying to adhere to human rights I just want to say one other thing this administration like all administrations has been full of some contradictions I almost put into my speech a quote about the need to advance human rights as the best way to fight terror a quote that comes from people in the Bush administration and they put it forward when they were presenting in front of the UN committee on human rights albeit you know I mean it would be wrong to paint a kind of monolithic picture about people in the Bush administration there are many people in that administration who do believe in human rights who have been in opposition there was just an article in the New York Times magazine I don't know if you read it about someone who had resigned, who was a conservative but who had resigned because he could not accept the way that they were redefining the meaning of torture so that they could carry out human rights practices so I just want to be clear about that that it's dangerous to make these kind of monolithic the administration and so on there are voices within the administration in fact we're counting on finding more voices within the administration that will begin to speak out and say we made a mistake it strikes me that a lot of the issues that you bring up about human rights violations in many ways by most of us I think are talked about in a purely political sense in fact I feel like the political reality reflects the social and cultural reality of the United States and how we conceive of violence, human rights, security and so I guess my question is what is Amnesty International and other organizations and people within the human rights so trying to continue the fight and the struggle not only within a political context but also social and cultural one as well wow everything we can I think it's a very serious question I'm only laughing because it's very hard in a very short space of time to begin to address it I think you're quite right that the battle for human rights is in fact a battle that has to be fought on all these different fronts cultural, you know political economic for that matter it's not simply one thing and I think the human rights movement and certainly Amnesty has had to learn that in fact it has to fight on all of those fronts and not just in the narrow sort of political sense I think we have I don't mean to be overly self critical but I think it's important that we be self critical because I think the human rights movement instead of addressing as I say some of the cultural issues some of the psychological issues about the war we were too narrowly political and legal and we gave the impression that we were people who felt we were above the human feelings that people had after 9-11 and we didn't address it well so I think we have to not only deal with cultural issues but also psychological issues and begin to understand how to talk about human rights in a way that people can understand that it's really about protecting the full integrity of human beings and taking into account the reality that we live in and not just some obscure legal point yeah one more one more you're the one thank you for your speech today this is a lovely audience but I think if people have looked around it's clear that there's a distinct shortage of young people who are the people who have come of age during this time of fear propaganda and it's kind of amazing to me that anyone on this campus who would have heard the terms 9-11, Human Rights and Amnesty International wouldn't have come running to learn more and find out what they could be doing so I'm wondering what your recommendations are for organizing the young people who have really grown up not knowing about the declaration of human rights and not knowing what human rights really could look like yeah I'm a big fan of young people I used to be one a long time ago and of course in my day young people were in the leadership of social movements whether it was for civil rights or whether it was in the anti-war movement and I'm happy to say that in Amnesty our fastest growing membership is young people that's not to say that there are enough of them and I don't know what happened that there aren't more of them here today but this goes back to the sense of dealing with talking about these issues in ways that speak to you know the concerns that young people have the language that sort of young people get I mean you know frankly I go way back in terms of Amnesty International in the early days when Amnesty was growing and when it was attracting young people and it was mostly young people who were involved it talked largely in moral terms and ethical terms it didn't talk in legal terms that made it feel like you had to have a doctorate before you could be part of the movement and it used popular culture in ways that were quite extraordinary I don't know if you were around when we did these extraordinary musical tours with Bruce Springsteen and Sting and other people, human rights now too but we found ways to communicate to an audience what human rights was about in a way that didn't make it seem like it was something dead and something old and something obscure and something that wasn't relevant to the lives I'm certainly trying to find ways to once again talk about human rights in ways that people understand that what's at stake is not some obscure legal treaty somewhere but it's their lives it's what kind of world they want to live in it's what kind of America they want to live in it's what kind of people they want us to be and I think if we can put things in those terms if we can begin to communicate to people that human rights is about human beings and that everybody is part of the human rights movement because every human being has these rights we're not a narrow constituency we represent human beings and I think we have to find a way again to communicate better than we have and I'm sure the room is full of educators here and I would just appeal to them to precisely ask the question you just asked which is how can we begin in this university to get people to see that human rights is about that kind of world and what kind of world we want and we need every student in this institution to do something it doesn't have to be join Amnesty International but to do something that will advance the idea that all human beings have all human rights including economic and social rights I'll end on that thank you very very much thank you I know that you all joined me in thanking Larry Cox for his very stimulating sobering remarks on human rights in the US and globally how we got here some issues going forward which I think we can agree are very mobilizing and for launching a dialogue which we hope will continue I'd also like to thank the Rosenthal family and friends for giving us the opportunity to join together to have this discussion I'd like to thank all of you in the audience I'd like to thank all of you in the audience for joining us this afternoon we would welcome you at future Ford School events anyone who would like to be on our mailing list there are some cards out just beyond the auditorium that you can sign and we'll make sure to put you on our mailing lists finally there is a reception on the other side outside of the auditorium and we hope you'll stay and join us to continue this dialogue there so thank you again and good afternoon